Joining the Mafia 106
billion.^189
They kept the name X.com, but would later change it
to PayPal because people associated X.com with pornogra-
phy. Elon, on the other hand, protested against the change.
He thought the name X.com was more flexible.^189
The merged company grew very fast. The number of
phone calls with customer complaints increased, and so
did the complaints coming in through e-mail. “We started
off with five people in customer service, and after two
months we had 100 000 customers,” Elon said. “So our
phone lines exploded.”^439 The solution PayPal had to solve
these complaints was to ignore them by not answering the
phone and by deleting the e-mails. “It took over three weeks
to get my money and four calls to their 800 number, waiting
an average of 25 minutes each on hold, and five e-mails
of which three were answered one week later,” a customer
said.^189
Harris decided to leave X.com after only a few months
and Elon replaced him as CEO. Now it was time for a
technological change. While Elon wanted to replace the
Unix platform with a Microsoft platform, Levchin preferred
the Unix platform. By the summer of 2000, Levchin gave
up and surrendered to Elon. “Well, if this is really going to
happen, I’m not going to be able to provide much value,
because I don’t really know anything about Windows,”
Levchin told Elon. The result of this difference in opinion
was a battle between the employees from the two old
companies.
Most of the original X.com employees would quit.